


Impersonation

by thegrendel



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Older Woman/Younger Man, Sex Change, Sex Magic, Thaumaturgy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 04:40:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16509554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrendel/pseuds/thegrendel
Summary: In a world where magic is commonplace, changing your gender is just a matter of the right rituals.And if you're just a janitor and offered the chance to move up in the world, and the only price for that is to become a woman ...





	Impersonation

"You want to what??? Change into a _woman_? Complete with breasts  
and . . . ? Biting off a bit more than you can chew, aren't you, my dear?"

"Belle, will you lay off me with your doubts and second-guessing and  
above all, your damnable nagging and leave me in peace for a change!"

Dressing up as a woman was nothing out of the ordinary for Frank. He  
had done it often enough. Transvestism was the current fashion in the  
academic set, and even drastic cross-gender behavior was nothing much  
out of the ordinary.

Frank had a slim build and was only a couple of inches above average  
height. With a bit of padding at the chest and hips and application of  
appropriate emoluments, he could convincingly mimic the appearance of a  
woman. The difficulty lay in mastering the gestures: walking and talking  
like a woman, performing common, everyday actions in the style of a woman,  
acting like a woman, _being_ a woman in all the essential ways  
but one. And even _that one_ was a surmountable barrier . . . if  
he availed himself of certain resources.

 

The Alumni Association Masquerade Ball was the grand social event  
of the season at the Highsmith Institute of Applied Thaumaturgy. A  
successful Ball helped raise sufficient funds to build much-needed lab  
facilities, pay salary increases for the faculty, and avert a strike by  
the maintenance staff by paying _their_ salary increases as well.

Assistant Mage Franklin Lewis Wickersham had already been passed over  
for tenure once, and he couldn't afford another setback. It would mean  
resigning himself to being a lowly undergrad alchemy instructor for  
the rest of his professional career. It would mean continuing to cut  
corners financially and never being able to afford the finer things in  
life. It would mean putting up with Belle's carping about luchre for the  
foreseeable future. It would mean the end of all his hopes and dreams  
for a better life.

Just yesterday, Manfredo Hawkins, head of the Alchemy Department,  
had approached Frank about the Ball. "Just a thought, old man. If you  
attended as a . . . well, as a member of the opposite sex, that might  
sit well with Edgard. I mean, of course, J. Edgard Hoosier, a high  
muckamuck with the First Royal Countinghouse, who just happens to be  
one of our major patrons. Contributed five million last year, he did,  
and his associates raised an additional ten. It's just that . . ."

"Just that what, Savant Hawkins?"

"Well, my good fellow, Edgard seems, ah, a bit eccentric in certain  
of his . . . preferences. His weakness happens to be men who have  
crossed the Great Divide and become women. No, no! I'm not speaking  
of transvestites, transgendrals, or even partial transforms. I mean  
complete parasexuals. It's the esthetic clash of sensibilities, the  
conflict between nature-given form and function, the cognitive dissonance  
that hits one between the eyes when things are not quite as they seem. In  
short, he's a throwback to the libertines of centuries past, and a randy  
old goat to boot. Calling him homogay or even bisexual couldn't begin to  
do him justice. More precise might be 'pansexual' or even 'omnisexual,'  
or perhaps just plain omnivorous. No, don't get me wrong. I'm not asking  
you to have carnal contact with the fellow . . . necessarily. Just satisfy  
his appetites to the point that, well, the point that he'll be amenable  
to our request, our request for increased funding this year."

"You're asking me to . . . transfeminize myself, then perform acts . . .  
_intimate_ acts with this, this Edgard Moneybags fellow? You  
want me to _prostitute_ myself" just because the school is short  
of money?

"No, Frank, not just for that . . . but because you owe me one."

He owed Mannie Hawkins more than one. Much more -- his career, his  
position at the school, his marriage to Cybele -- his very identity.

 

Frank had been a menial -- a broom pusher and a window washer -- when  
Hawkins had intruded into his life, and changed it irrevocably. The  
peremptory summons to a Savant's office, in fact, to a department head's  
office, had come as a total surprise. Could he have offended someone? Had  
he perhaps left the windows streaky in the Alchemy Building? What in  
the Sixteen Gehennas was this all about?

"How would you like to participate in an experiment, Frank?"

"A _what_? Surely you jest."

"I'm deadly serious, my good man, and you might want to mind your  
manners."

"My apologies, sir. Didn't mean to be rude. I know I'm only a clean-up  
man, but I do take pride in my work."

"Frank, just between the two of us, you strike me as being very  
intelligent, perhaps too intelligent for your assigned station in  
life. Well, possibly I can offer you a chance to improve yourself. What  
would you think of that?"

"Improve myself? That doesn't put the coin of the realm in my pocket. Just  
how much does this so-called experiment pay?"

"Only a nominal gratuity, unfortunately. Fifty ducats, to be exact. But  
it will change your life. My sincere pledge on that."

It involved mesmerism, of course. Deep mesmerism. Restructing a person's  
self-image and belief systems was analogous to doing major chirurgy,  
but in this instance it was psychic chirurgy. The subject's index of  
cogitation potential was at the high end of the normal range, so it was  
only a matter of adding about 30 MEQ-equivalent marks to bring him to the  
desired level. Certain abilities required enhancement. A newly concocted  
elixir, Neurpromazine-B, increased the nerve-impulse propagation speed,  
and as a side-effect, dissolved inhibitions against knowledge acquisition.

Frank lugged the stack of bound volumes into Savant Hawkins's antechamber.

"Heavy going, huh, squire?" the scrivener asked.

"I appreciate your concern, Mistress Amelia, but each of these has opened  
a new world to me. It's like getting the key to a magical doorway. I feel  
as though I were a child again, and everything feels new and fresh and  
waiting to be discovered. Me! This is the fellow who never had a single  
book in his house. The fellow who spent five hours a day watching the  
conjure-vision tube. The fellow who sleepwalked through life."

"So now you're the great intellect. My word, I'm impressed." Amelia  
sniffed. "The Savant will see you now."

"We're at a critical stage in the Pygmalion Project, Frank. You're easily  
as intelligent as many of the instructors at this university, and if you  
lack book learning, we're well on our way to remedying that. The question  
is, what's the next step?"

The next step was infiltrating Frank onto the faculty. Frank Williams  
assumed the identity of Franklin Lewis Wickersham, visiting Scholar of  
Bohemian Necromancy "from a major faculty back east." Some minor cosmetic  
chirurgy had effaced most of the resemblance to a former janitor (not that  
anyone takes any particular notice of the maintenance staff anyhow). That,  
and some diction lessons eased him into his new role.

 

". . . and your dissertations are due by the beginning of next week. That  
will be all for the day, ladies and gentlemen."

"Savant! Might I speak with you for a moment?"

Gennie de Haarlem, one of the lesser lights in the class, bounded up the  
steps to the podium of the lecture hall.

"Yes?"

"I can't quite seem to wrap my mind around the Principle of Similarity,  
Savant Wickersham. Could you possibly illuminate it?"

"My dear child," he sighed, "it is only the basis for much of the  
industrial magick that supplies the motive force for our kingdom's  
economy. If two objects resemble each other in certain critical  
attributes, then there necessarily exists an underlying connection between  
them. It follows that manipulating the one object affects the other.

"Permit me to demonstrate." He picked up a sheet of vellum and formed it  
into a cone. "You see, this resembles -- in rough outward form only --  
one of your sweet mammaries."

Gennie blushed scarlet.

"Now, observe as I stroke the palm of my hand over the surface of the  
parchment."

The young woman clasped a hand to her bosom and began giggling madly.

"As you see," he said, "you can actually feel the touch of my hand on  
your own . . . flesh."

"Does that mean, Savant," she forced out between giggles, "that if I  
should grasp my extended middle finger like so . . . "

There was a tingle in his loins as Wickersham felt her caress mirror  
itself in his . . . Damn! She _did_ have a bit of the Touch,  
after all!

"Away with you, silly girl! You understand all too well." He couldn't  
resist giving her a quick swat on her pert behind as she fled out the  
door, still giggling.

Perhaps he should have taken her up on the implied offer. Belle wouldn't  
have particularly minded, not being the jealous sort, and it could have  
been one of his last opportunities for male-role sex for a good while  
. . . assuming things worked out as planned, that is.

 

In bed, listening to the soft breathing next to him, he began having  
doubts. Certainly there was nothing in the least bit sacred about  
gender roles -- men changed into women, and vice-versa -- all the  
time. Conjuration technology had long since blurred the distinction  
between the sexes, but, damn it, Frank _liked_ being a man. Sure,  
he sometimes let other men penetrate him in his hind passage as the urge  
struck him, but that was commonplace, and it certainly had nothing to do  
with _who he was_ , with his gender identity. Transmorphing all  
the way into an opposite-sex person, indistinguishable from any other  
woman physically, even capable of _conceiving and bearing_ \-- now  
that was something else again. But he could hardly refuse. A "request"  
from Hawkins was tantamount to an order.

Ah, well, it was still early and the night was long. He rolled over and  
awakened Belle with a gentle kiss.

 

A radical paragendric procedure is always a chancy undertaking. Frank  
was panting and perspiring freely, and not all of that was due to  
the stifling heat inside the sealed oaken cabinet within which he was  
confined. Hawkins had done this often enough that it was almost routine,  
or so he said. But still . . .

The droning incantations of chanting savants and their apprentices  
vibrated the walls of the enclosure and lulled him into a trance state.  
His mind drifted into a reverie of happier times and he remembered when  
Hawkins had introduced him to an unmarried sister of his, the woman who  
was to become the love of his life.
    
    
        Cybele was an aging spinster, much past marriageable age, but still
        somewhat maidenly in appearance due to heavy usage of costly youthening
        elixirs. She was desperately hungry, hungry for a companion. And Frank
        was her quarry.
    
        An older woman. Much too old for him. Frank had been repulsed at
        first. But there was something about her eyes, her touch, the words
        she whispered in his ear, and . . . he had gradually fallen under
        her spell. Was it a potion in the tea she brewed for him? Was it the
        carnal pleasures her lush flesh hinted at? Was it the promised touch
        of burning-hot nether lips? Whatever the case, Frank was ensorceled,
        enslaved, and thoroughly besozzled by the magickal essence of her
        being, and Belle had never given him cause to regret a single moment
        of it.
    
        He remembered the first time they had . . . loved. Frank had been
        visiting, and since the hour was growing late he had prepared to take
        his leave. Leaning over to give her a farewell buss on her lovely
        cheek, he was shocked to the depths of his soul when she turned her
        head slightly to catch his lips on hers. The shock of it had nearly
        sent him into a swoon, and when he recovered his senses he was in
        her arms and the two of them were unclothed and it was the most
        natural thing in the world for him to enter her dark mystery and . . .
    

It was even hotter now, and breathing was like trying to inhale live  
steam. Now the impenetrable dark shattered in a silent detonation as  
Frank felt his body melt, then begin to reassemble, but something had  
gone wrong, badly wrong. . . .

"One, two, three . . . awaken!"

Francesca blinked her eyes. "Where . . . what . . . ?"

She was lying on a soft surface resembling a sort of bed, but with a  
smooth black covering. It wasn't leather, nor was it any other material  
she immediately recognized.

"Miss . . . "

A bearded man came into her field of view. He was wearing a tunic cut  
in an unfamiliar style, with matching pantaloons.

"I was getting a mite worried there. You failed to come out of the trance  
and I had to resort to . . . "

Two sets of memories clashed within her mind. She was . . . he was  
being magicked into a woman . . . being hypnotized to erase troubling  
delusions of living a different existence . . . of a world where sorcery  
and sex-change magic was commonplace and . . . and everything snapped  
into place.

What foolishness. No rational person believed in magic, and for a  
chemistry professor at the Highsmith Institute of Applied Technology to  
let herself slip into a fantasy world would be professional suicide. In  
fact, that was why she was undergoing intensive hypnotherapy. Therapy  
that had finally begun to sink in.

"Thank you, Doctor Frankenheimer. I'm feeling better now, and since the  
clock shows we're running late, I guess I'd best be on my way."

Just time enough to hop into her BMW sportster and meet Eddie Hoosier  
at the restaurant. She'd promised Manny, her department head, that she'd  
be sweet to the old fart so he'd pony up more grant money. Who knows --  
might even hop into the sack with the dude if he didn't have bad breath.


End file.
